Neighborhood effects and honey bee foraging behavior

Abstract

Insect pollinators frequently forage with conspecifics in nature, thus it is important to understand their behavioral responses to the presence of conspecifics on flowers. Plant-pollinator interactions can be influenced by neighboring flowers, and these neighborhood effects can have important implications for plant fitness. Research about neighborhood effects generally tests how plant traits or different plant communities affect plant-pollinator or plant-herbivore interactions. However, neighborhood effects can also be considered from the point of view of an insect pollinator and how the presence of their own conspecifics on plants alters their perceptions of plant quality. We used the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, to test whether neighborhood effects affect honey bee foraging behavior. In this context, we refer to neighborhood effects as the relative number of bees on neighboring flowers compared to the number of bees on a focal flower. We found that in a floral neighborhood, the relative number of honey bees present on neighboring flowers has a weak effect, such that more bees on neighboring flowers increase the likelihood of visits to a focal flower. Our results suggest that high numbers of bees on neighboring flowers increase the attractiveness of the entire neighborhood and low numbers of bees on the neighboring flowers decrease the attractiveness of the neighborhood, highlighting that bee activity on neighboring flowers may have significant impacts on pollination services.

Keywords:

• foraging behavior
• neighborhood effects
• conspecifics
• honey bees
• pollinator

Acknowledgments

We thank all of the undergraduate students who helped make this work possible including Gui Zheng, Veronica Huizar Cabral, Elizabeth Pacheco, Andrea Ku, and DaLaina Cameron. We thank Nancy Sasaki and Anthea Rooen who provided funding to support the undergraduate students GZ, VHC, EP and DC, and the University of Denver Undergraduate Research Center for funding AK. We also thank Jake Wilson, Claudia Hallagan, and Moorea Diamond for also helping us with data collection. We thank Cathy Durso, Cara Scalpone, and Mayra Vidal for statistical advice. We thank the University of Denver Ecology and Evolutionary Biologists group, in particular Dr. Julie M Morris and Dr. Robin Tinghitella, for edits that greatly improved previous versions of this manuscript. This work was funded by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award and a Sigma Xi Grant-In-Aid of Research, both to ESHL.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Availability of data and material

Data are available at Zenodo https://zenodo.org/record/6385440#.Yj4Rqi-B2qQ

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.